“You say that you could spin out by the yard verses in the fashion of

the present day. I wish you would give me a specimen of your skill in

that handiwork.”

“Very well; on one condition, that you will repay my trouble by

a specimen of your own verses, not in the fashion of the present

day,--something which I can construe. I defy you to construe mine.”

“Agreed.”

“Well, then, let us take it for granted that this is the Augustan age of

English poetry, and that the English language is dead, like the Latin.

Suppose I am writing for a prize-medal in English, as I wrote at

college for a prize-medal in Latin: of course, I shall be successful in

proportion as I introduce the verbal elegances peculiar to our Augustan

age, and also catch the prevailing poetic characteristic of that

classical epoch.

“Now I think that every observant critic will admit that the striking

distinctions of the poetry most in the fashion of the present day,

namely, of the Augustan age, are,--first, a selection of such verbal

elegances as would have been most repulsive to the barbaric taste of the

preceding century; and, secondly, a very lofty disdain of all prosaic

condescensions to common-sense, and an elaborate cultivation of that

element of the sublime which Mr. Burke defines under the head of

obscurity.

“These premises conceded, I will only ask you to choose the metre. Blank

verse is very much in fashion just now.”

“Pooh! blank verse indeed! I am not going so to free your experiment

from the difficulties of rhyme.”

“It is all one to me,” said Kenelm, yawning; “rhyme be it: heroic or

lyrical?”

“Heroics are old-fashioned; but the Chaucer couplet, as brought to

perfection by our modern poets, I think the best adapted to dainty

leaves and uncrackable nuts. I accept the modern Chaucerian. The

subject?”

“Oh, never trouble yourself about that. By whatever title your Augustan

verse-maker labels his poem, his genius, like Pindar’s, disdains to be

cramped by the subject. Listen, and don’t suffer Max to howl, if he can

help it. Here goes.”

And in an affected but emphatic sing-song Kenelm began:--

“In Attica the gentle Pythias dwelt.

Youthful he was, and passing rich: he felt

As if nor youth nor riches could suffice

For bliss. Dark-eyed Sophronia was a nice

Girl: and one summer day, when Neptune drove

His sea-car slowly, and the olive grove

That skirts Ilissus, to thy shell, Harmonia,

Rippled, he said ‘I love thee’ to Sophronia.

Crocus and iris, when they heard him, wagged

Their pretty heads in glee: the honey-bagged

Bees became altars: and the forest dove

Her plumage smoothed. Such is the charm of love.

Of this sweet story do ye long for more?

Wait till I publish it in volumes four;

Which certain critics, my good friends, will cry

Up beyond Chaucer. Take their word for ‘t. I

Say ‘Trust them, but not read,--or you’ll not buy.’”

“You have certainly kept your word,” said the minstrel, laughing; “and

if this be the Augustan age, and the English were a dead language, you

deserve to win the prize-medal.”

“You flatter me,” said Kenelm, modestly. “But if I, who never before

strung two rhymes together, can improvise so readily in the style of the

present day, why should not a practical rhymester like yourself dash off

at a sitting a volume or so in the same style; disguising completely the

verbal elegances borrowed, adding to the delicacies of the rhyme by the

frequent introduction of a line that will not scan, and towering yet

more into the sublime by becoming yet more unintelligible? Do that, and

I promise you the most glowing panegyric in ‘The Londoner,’ for I will

write it myself.”

“‘The Londoner’!” exclaimed the minstrel, with an angry flush on his

cheek and brow, “my bitter, relentless enemy.”

“I fear, then, you have as little studied the critical press of the

Augustan age as you have imbued your muse with the classical spirit of

its verse. For the art of writing a man must cultivate himself. The art

of being reviewed consists in cultivating the acquaintance of reviewers.

In the Augustan age criticism is cliquism. Belong to a clique and you

are Horace or Tibullus. Belong to no clique and, of course, you are

Bavius or Maevius. ‘The Londoner’ is the enemy of no man: it holds all

men in equal contempt. But as, in order to amuse, it must abuse, it

compensates the praise it is compelled to bestow upon the members of its

clique by heaping additional scorn upon all who are cliqueless. Hit him

hard: he has no friends.”

“Ah,” said the minstrel, “I believe that there is much truth in what you

say. I never had a friend among the cliques. And Heaven knows with what

pertinacity those from whom I, in utter ignorance of the rules which

govern so-called organs of opinion, had hoped, in my time of struggle,

for a little sympathy, a kindly encouragement, have combined to crush

me down. They succeeded long. But at last I venture to hope that I

am beating them. Happily, Nature endowed me with a sanguine, joyous,

elastic temperament. He who never despairs seldom completely fails.”

This speech rather perplexed Kenelm, for had not the minstrel declared

that his singing days were over, that he had decided on the renunciation

of verse-making? What other path to fame, from which the critics had

not been able to exclude his steps, was he, then, now pursuing,--he whom

Kenelm had assumed to belong to some commercial moneymaking firm? No

doubt some less difficult prose-track, probably a novel. Everybody

writes novels nowadays, and as the public will read novels without being

told to do so, and will not read poetry unless they are told that they

ought, possibly novels are not quite so much at the mercy of cliques as

are the poems of our Augustan age.

However, Kenelm did not think of seeking for further confidence on that

score. His mind at that moment, not unnaturally, wandered from books and

critics to love and wedlock.

“Our talk,” said he, “has digressed into fretful courses; permit me

to return to the starting-point. You are going to settle down into the

peace of home. A peaceful home is like a good conscience. The rains

without do not pierce its roof, the winds without do not shake its

walls. If not an impertinent question, is it long since you have known

your intended bride?”

“Yes, very long.”

“And always loved her?”

“Always, from her infancy. Out of all womankind, she was designed to be

my life’s playmate and my soul’s purifier. I know not what might have

become of me, if the thought of her had not walked beside me as my

guardian angel. For, like many vagrants from the beaten high roads of

the world, there is in my nature something of that lawlessness which

belongs to high animal spirits, to the zest of adventure, and the warm

blood that runs into song, chiefly because song is the voice of a joy.

And no doubt, when I look back on the past years I must own that I have

too often been led astray from the objects set before my reason, and

cherished at my heart, by erring impulse or wanton fancy.”

“Petticoat interest, I presume,” interposed Kenelm, dryly.

“I wish I could honestly answer ‘No,’” said the minstrel, colouring

high. “But from the worst, from all that would have permanently blasted

the career to which I intrust my fortunes, all that would have rendered

me unworthy of the pure love that now, I trust, awaits and crowns

my dreams of happiness, I have been saved by the haunting smile in a

sinless infantine face. Only once was I in great peril,--that hour of

peril I recall with a shudder. It was at Luscombe.”

“At Luscombe!”

“In the temptation of a terrible crime I thought I heard a voice say,

‘Mischief! Remember the little child.’ In that supervention which is so

readily accepted as a divine warning, when the imagination is morbidly

excited, and when the conscience, though lulled asleep for a moment, is

still asleep so lightly that the sigh of a breeze, the fall of a leaf,

can awake it with a start of terror, I took the voice for that of my

guardian angel. Thinking it over later, and coupling the voice with the

moral of those weird lines you repeated to me so appositely the next

day, I conclude that I am not mistaken when I say it was from your lips

that the voice which preserved me came.”

“I confess the impertinence: you pardon it?”

The minstrel seized Kenelm’s hand and pressed it earnestly.

“Pardon it! Oh, could you but guess what cause I have to be grateful,

everlastingly grateful! That sudden cry, the remorse and horror of my

own self that it struck into me,--deepened by those rugged lines which

the next day made me shrink in dismay from ‘the face of my darling

sin’! Then came the turning-point of my life. From that day, the lawless

vagabond within me was killed. I mean not, indeed, the love of Nature

and of song which had first allured the vagabond, but the hatred of

steadfast habits and of serious work,--_that_ was killed. I no longer

trifled with my calling: I took to it as a serious duty. And when I saw

her, whom fate has reserved and reared for my bride, her face was no

longer in my eyes that of the playful child; the soul of the woman was

dawning into it. It is but two years since that day, to me so eventful.

Yet my fortunes are now secured. And if fame be not established, I am at

last in a position which warrants my saying to her I love, ‘The time has

come when, without fear for thy future, I can ask thee to be mine.’”

The man spoke with so fervent a passion that Kenelm silently left him

to recover his wonted self-possession,--not unwilling to be silent,--not

unwilling, in the softness of the hour, passing from roseate sunset into

starry twilight, to murmur to himself, “And the time, too, has come for

me!”

After a few moments the minstrel resumed lightly and cheerily,--

“Sir, your turn: pray have you long known--judging by our former

conversation you cannot have long loved--the lady whom you have wooed

and won?”

As Kenelm had neither as yet wooed nor won the lady in question, and did

not deem it necessary to enter into any details on the subject of love

particular to himself, he replied by a general observation,--

“It seems to me that the coming of love is like the coming of spring:

the date is not to be reckoned by the calendar. It may be slow and

gradual; it may be quick and sudden. But in the morning, when we wake

and recognize a change in the world without, verdure on the trees,

blossoms on the sward, warmth in the sunshine, music in the air, then we

say Spring has come!”

“I like your illustration. And if it be an idle question to ask a lover

how long he has known the beloved one, so it is almost as idle to ask if

she be not beautiful. He cannot but see in her face the beauty she has

given to the world without.”

“True; and that thought is poetic enough to make me remind you that I

favoured you with the maiden specimen of my verse-making on condition

that you repaid me by a specimen of your own practical skill in the art.

And I claim the right to suggest the theme. Let it be--”

“Of a beefsteak?”

“Tush, you have worn out that tasteless joke at my expense. The theme

must be of love, and if you could improvise a stanza or two expressive

of the idea you just uttered I shall listen with yet more pleased

attention.”

“Alas! I am no _improvisatore_. Yet I will avenge myself on your former

neglect of my craft by chanting to you a trifle somewhat in unison with

the thought you ask me to versify, but which you would not stay to hear

at Tor Hadham (though you did drop a shilling into Max’s tray); it was

one of the songs I sang that evening, and it was not ill-received by my

humble audience.

“THE BEAUTY OF THE MISTRESS IS IN THE LOVER’S EYE.

“Is she not pretty, my Mabel May?

Nobody ever yet called her so.

Are not her lineaments faultless, say?

If I must answer you plainly, No.

“Joy to believe that the maid I love

None but myself as she is can see;

Joy that she steals from her heaven above,

And is only revealed on this earth to me!”

As soon as he had finished this very artless ditty, the minstrel rose

and said,--

“Now I must bid you good-by. My way lies through those meadows, and

yours no doubt along the high road.”

“Not so. Permit me to accompany you. I have a lodging not far from

hence, to which the path through the fields is the shortest way.”

The minstrel turned a somewhat surprised and somewhat inquisitive look

towards Kenelm. But feeling, perhaps, that having withheld from his

fellow-traveller all confidence as to his own name and attributes, he

had no right to ask any confidence from that gentleman not voluntarily

made to him, he courteously said “that he wished the way were longer,

since it would be so pleasantly halved,” and strode forth at a brisk

pace.

The twilight was now closing into the brightness of a starry summer

night, and the solitude of the fields was unbroken. Both these men,

walking side by side, felt supremely happy. But happiness is like wine;

its effect differing with the differing temperaments on which it

acts. In this case garrulous and somewhat vaunting with the one man,

warm-coloured, sensuous, impressionable to the influences of external

Nature, as an Aeolian harp to the rise or fall of a passing wind; and,

with the other man, taciturn and somewhat modestly expressed, saturnine,

meditative, not indeed dull to the influences of external Nature, but

deeming them of no value, save where they passed out of the domain of

the sensuous into that of the intellectual, and the soul of man dictated

to the soulless Nature its own questions and its own replies.

The minstrel took the talk on himself, and the talk charmed his

listener. It became so really eloquent in the tones of its utterance, in

the frank play of its delivery, that I could no more adequately describe

it than a reporter, however faithful to every word a true orator may

say, can describe that which, apart from all words, belongs to the

presence of the orator himself.

Not, then, venturing to report the language of this singular itinerant,

I content myself with saying that the substance of it was of the

nature on which it is said most men can be eloquent: it was personal

to himself. He spoke of aspirations towards the achievement of a name,

dating back to the dawn of memory; of early obstacles in lowly birth,

stinted fortunes; of a sudden opening to his ambition while yet in

boyhood, through the generous favour of a rich man, who said, “The child

has genius: I will give it the discipline of culture; one day it shall

repay to the world what it owes to me;” of studies passionately begun,

earnestly pursued, and mournfully suspended in early youth. He did not

say how or wherefore: he rushed on to dwell upon the struggles for a

livelihood for himself and those dependent on him; how in such struggles

he was compelled to divert toil and energy from the systematic pursuit

of the object he had once set before him; the necessities for money

were too urgent to be postponed to the visions of fame. “But even,” he

exclaimed, passionately, “even in such hasty and crude manifestations

of what is within me, as circumstances limited my powers, I know that

I ought to have found from those who profess to be authoritative judges

the encouragement of praise. How much better, then, I should have done

if I had found it! How a little praise warms out of a man the good

that is in him, and the sneer of a contempt which he feels to be unjust

chills the ardour to excel! However, I forced my way, so far as was then

most essential to me, the sufficing breadmaker for those I loved; and in

my holidays of song and ramble I found a delight that atoned for all the

rest. But still the desire of fame, once conceived in childhood, once

nourished through youth, never dies but in our grave. Foot and hoof may

tread it down, bud, leaf, stalk; its root is too deep below the surface

for them to reach, and year after year stalk and leaf and bud re-emerge.

Love may depart from our mortal life: we console ourselves; the beloved

will be reunited to us in the life to come. But if he who sets his heart

on fame loses it in this life, what can console him?”

“Did you not say a little while ago that fame allowed of no grave?”

“True; but if we do not achieve it before we ourselves are in the grave,

what comfort can it give to us? Love ascends to heaven, to which we hope

ourselves to ascend; but fame remains on the earth, which we shall never

again revisit. And it is because fame is earth-born that the desire for

it is the most lasting, the regret for the want of it the most bitter,

to the child of earth. But I shall achieve it now; it is already in my

grasp.”

By this time the travellers had arrived at the brook, facing the wooden

bridge beside Cromwell Lodge.

Here the minstrel halted; and Kenelm with a certain tremble in his

voice, said, “Is it not time that we should make ourselves known to

each other by name? I have no longer any cause to conceal mine, indeed I

never had any cause stronger than whim,--Kenelm Chillingly, the only son

of Sir Peter, of Exmundham, -----shire.”

“I wish your father joy of so clever a son,” said the minstrel with his

wonted urbanity. “You already know enough of me to be aware that I am

of much humbler birth and station than you; but if you chance to have

visited the exhibition of the Royal Academy this year--ah! I understand

that start--you might have recognized a picture of which you have seen

the rudimentary sketch, ‘The Girl with the Flower-ball,’ one of three

pictures very severely handled by ‘The Londoner,’ but, in spite of

that potent enemy, insuring fortune and promising fame to the wandering

minstrel, whose name, if the sight of the pictures had induced you to

inquire into that, you would have found to be Walter Melville. Next

January I hope, thanks to that picture, to add, ‘Associate of the Royal

Academy.’ The public will not let them keep me out of it, in spite of

‘The Londoner.’ You are probably an expected guest at one of the more

imposing villas from which we see the distant lights. I am going to a

very humble cottage, in which henceforth I hope to find my established

home. I am there now only for a few days, but pray let me welcome you

there before I leave. The cottage is called Grasmere.”

CHAPTER VI.

THE minstrel gave a cordial parting shake of the hand to the

fellow-traveller whom he had advised to settle down, not noticing how

very cold had become the hand in his own genial grasp. Lightly he passed

over the wooden bridge, preceded by Max, and merrily, when he had gained

the other side of the bridge, came upon Kenelm’s ear, through the hush

of the luminous night, the verse of the uncompleted love-song,--

“Singing, singing,

Lustily singing,

Down the road, with his dogs before,

Came the Ritter of Nierestein.”

Love-song, uncompleted; why uncompleted? It was not given to Kenelm to

divine the why. It was a love-song versifying one of the prettiest fairy

tales in the world, which was a great favourite with Lily, and which

Lion had promised Lily to versify, but only to complete it in her

presence and to her perfect satisfaction.

CHAPTER VII.

IF I could not venture to place upon paper the exact words of an

eloquent coveter of fame, the earth-born, still less can I dare to place

upon paper all that passed through the voiceless heart of a coveter of

love, the heaven-born.

From the hour in which Kenelm Chillingly had parted from Walter Melville

until somewhere between sunrise and noon the next day, the summer

joyousness of that external Nature which does now and then, though, for

the most part, deceitfully, address to the soul of man questions and

answers all her soulless own, laughed away the gloom of his misgivings.

No doubt this Walter Melville was the beloved guardian of Lily; no doubt

it was Lily whom he designated as reserved and reared to become his

bride. But on that question Lily herself had the sovereign voice. It

remained yet to be seen whether Kenelm had deceived himself in the

belief that had made the world so beautiful to him since the hour of

their last parting. At all events it was due to her, due even to his

rival, to assert his own claim to her choice. And the more he recalled

all that Lily had ever said to him of her guardian, so openly, so

frankly, proclaiming affection, admiration, gratitude, the more

convincingly his reasonings allayed his fears, whispering, “So might

a child speak of a parent: not so does the maiden speak of the man she

loves; she can scarcely trust herself to praise.”

In fine, it was not in despondent mood, nor with dejected looks, that,

a little before noon, Kenelm crossed the bridge and re-entered the

enchanted land of Grasmere. In answer to his inquiries, the servant who

opened the door said that neither Mr. Melville nor Miss Mordaunt were

at home; they had but just gone out together for a walk. He was about to

turn back, when Mrs. Cameron came into the hall, and, rather by

gesture than words, invited him to enter. Kenelm followed her into the

drawing-room, taking his seat beside her. He was about to speak, when

she interrupted him in a tone of voice so unlike its usual languor, so

keen, so sharp, that it sounded like a cry of distress.

“I was just about to come to you. Happily, however, you find me alone,

and what may pass between us will be soon over. But first tell me: you

have seen your parents; you have asked their consent to wed a girl such

as I described; tell me, oh tell me that that consent is refused!”

“On the contrary, I am here with their full permission to ask the hand

of your niece.”

Mrs. Cameron sank back in her chair, rocking herself to and fro in the

posture of a person in great pain.

“I feared that. Walter said he had met you last evening; that you, like

himself, entertained the thought of marriage. You, of course when you

learned his name, must have known with whom his thought was connected.

Happily, he could not divine what was the choice to which your youthful

fancy had been so blindly led.”

“My dear Mrs. Cameron,” said Kenelm, very mildly, but very firmly, “you

were aware of the purpose for which I left Moleswich a few days ago,

and it seems to me that you might have forestalled my intention, the

intention which brings me; thus early to your house. I come to say to

Miss Mordaunt’s guardian, ‘I ask the hand of your ward. If you also woo

her, I have a very noble rival. With both of us no consideration for our

own happiness can be comparable to the duty of consulting hers. Let her

choose between the two.’”

“Impossible!” exclaimed Mrs. Cameron; “impossible. You know not what you

say; know not, guess not, how sacred are the claims of Walter Melville

to all that the orphan whom he has protected from her very birth can

give him in return. She has no right to a preference for another: her

heart is too grateful to admit of one. If the choice were given to her

between him and you, it is he whom she would choose. Solemnly I assure

you of this. Do not, then, subject her to the pain of such a choice.

Suppose, if you will, that you had attracted her fancy, and that now you

proclaimed your love and urged your suit, she would not, must not, the

less reject your hand, but you might cloud her happiness in accepting

Melville’s. Be generous. Conquer your own fancy; it can be but a passing

one. Speak not to her, nor to Mr. Melville, of a wish which can never be

realized. Go hence, silently, and at once.”

The words and the manner of the pale imploring woman struck a vague

awe into the heart of her listener. But he did not the less resolutely

answer, “I cannot obey you. It seems to me that my honour commands me

to prove to your niece that, if I mistook the nature of her feelings

towards me, I did not, by word or look, lead her to believe mine towards

herself were less in earnest than they are; and it seems scarcely less

honourable towards my worthy rival to endanger his own future happiness,

should he discover later that his bride would have been happier with

another. Why be so mysteriously apprehensive? If, as you say, with such

apparent conviction, there is no doubt of your niece’s preference for

another, at a word from her own lips I depart, and you will see me no

more. But that word must be said by her; and if you will not permit me

to ask for it in your own house, I will take my chance of finding her

now, on her walk with Mr. Melville; and, could he deny me the right to

speak to her alone, that which I would say can be said in his presence.

Ah! madam, have you no mercy for the heart that you so needlessly

torture? If I must bear the worst, let me learn it, and at once.”

“Learn it, then, from my lips,” said Mrs. Cameron, speaking with voice

unnaturally calm, and features rigidly set into stern composure. “And I

place the secret you wring from me under the seal of that honour which

you so vauntingly make your excuse for imperilling the peace of the home

I ought never to have suffered you to enter. An honest couple, of

humble station and narrow means, had an only son, who evinced in early

childhood talents so remarkable that they attracted the notice of

the father’s employer, a rich man of very benevolent heart and very

cultivated taste. He sent the child, at his expense, to a first-rate

commercial school, meaning to provide for him later in his own firm.

The rich man was the head partner of an eminent bank; but very infirm

health, and tastes much estranged from business, had induced him to

retire from all active share in the firm, the management of which was

confined to a son whom he idolized. But the talents of the protege he

had sent to school took there so passionate a direction towards art

and estranged from trade, and his designs in drawing when shown to

connoisseurs were deemed so promising of future excellence, that the

patron changed his original intention, entered him as a pupil in the

studio of a distinguished French painter, and afterwards bade him

perfect his taste by the study of Italian and Flemish masterpieces.

“He was still abroad, when--” here Mrs. Cameron stopped, with visible

effort, suppressed a sob, and went on, whisperingly, through teeth

clenched together--“when a thunderbolt fell on the house of the patron,

shattering his fortunes, blasting his name. The son, unknown to the

father, had been decoyed into speculations which proved unfortunate: the

loss might have been easily retrieved in the first instance; unhappily

he took the wrong course to retrieve it, and launched into new hazards.

I must be brief. One day the world was startled by the news that a firm,

famed for its supposed wealth and solidity, was bankrupt. Dishonesty

was alleged, was proved, not against the father,--he went forth from

the trial, censured indeed for neglect, not condemned for fraud, but a

penniless pauper. The--son, the son, the idolized son, was removed from

the prisoner’s dock, a convicted felon, sentenced to penal servitude;

escaped that sentence by--by--you guess--you guess. How could he escape

except through death?--death by his own guilty deed?”

Almost as much overpowered by emotion as Mrs. Cameron herself, Kenelm

covered his bended face with one hand, stretching out the other blindly

to clasp her own, but she would not take it.

A dreary foreboding. Again before his eyes rose the old gray

tower,--again in his ears thrilled the tragic tale of the Fletwodes.

What was yet left untold held the young man in spell-bound silence. Mrs.

Cameron resumed,--

“I said the father was a penniless pauper; he died lingeringly

bedridden. But one faithful friend did not desert that bed,--the youth

to whose genius his wealth had ministered. He had come from abroad

with some modest savings from the sale of copies or sketches made in

Florence. These savings kept a roof over the heads of the old man and

the two helpless, broken-hearted women,--paupers like himself,--his own

daughter and his son’s widow. When the savings were gone, the young man

stooped from his destined calling, found employment somehow, no matter

how alien to his tastes, and these three whom his toil supported never

wanted a home or food. Well, a few weeks after her husband’s terrible

death, his young widow (they had not been a year married) gave birth to

a child,--a girl. She did not survive the exhaustion of her confinement

many days. The shock of her death snapped the feeble thread of the poor

father’s life. Both were borne to the grave on the same day. Before they

died, both made the same prayer to their sole two mourners, the felon’s

sister, the old man’s young benefactor. The prayer was this, that the

new-born infant should be reared, however humbly, in ignorance of her

birth, of a father’s guilt and shame. She was not to pass a suppliant

for charity to rich and high-born kinsfolk, who had vouchsafed no word

even of pity to the felon’s guiltless father and as guiltless wife. That

promise has been kept till now. I am that daughter. The name I bear,

and the name which I gave to my niece, are not ours, save as we may

indirectly claim them through alliances centuries ago. I have never

married. I was to have been a bride, bringing to the representative of

no ignoble house what was to have been a princely dower; the wedding day

was fixed, when the bolt fell. I have never again seen my betrothed. He

went abroad and died there. I think he loved me; he knew I loved him.

Who can blame him for deserting me? Who could marry the felon’s sister?

Who would marry the felon’s child? Who but one? The man who knows

her secret, and will guard it; the man who, caring little for other

education, has helped to instil into her spotless childhood so steadfast

a love of truth, so exquisite a pride of honour, that did she know such

ignominy rested on her birth she would pine herself away.”

“Is there only one man on earth,” cried Kenelm, suddenly, rearing his

face,--till then concealed and downcast,--and with a loftiness of pride

on its aspect, new to its wonted mildness, “is there only one man who

would deem the virgin at whose feet he desires to kneel and say, ‘Deign

to be the queen of my life,’ not far too noble in herself to be debased

by the sins of others before she was even born; is there only one man

who does not think that the love of truth and the pride of honour are

most royal attributes of woman or of man, no matter whether the fathers

of the woman or the man were pirates as lawless as the fathers of

Norman kings, or liars as unscrupulous, where their own interests

were concerned, as have been the crowned representatives of lines as

deservedly famous as Caesars and Bourbons, Tudors and Stuarts? Nobility,

like genius, is inborn. One man alone guard _her_ secret!--guard a

secret that if made known could trouble a heart that recoils from shame!

Ah, madam, we Chillinglys are a very obscure, undistinguished race, but

for more than a thousand years we have been English gentlemen. Guard her

secret rather than risk the chance of discovery that could give her a

pang! I would pass my whole life by her side in Kamtchatka, and even

there I would not snatch a glimpse of the secret itself with mine own

eyes: it should be so closely muffled and wrapped round by the folds of

reverence and worship.”

This burst of passion seemed to Mrs. Cameron the senseless declamation

of an inexperienced, hot-headed young man; and putting it aside, much

as a great lawyer dismisses as balderdash the florid rhetoric of some

junior counsel, rhetoric in which the great lawyer had once indulged,

or as a woman for whom romance is over dismisses as idle verbiage some

romantic sentiment that befools her young daughter, Mrs. Cameron simply

replied, “All this is hollow talk, Mr. Chillingly; let us come to the

point. After all I have said, do you mean to persist in your suit to my

niece?”

“I persist.”

“What!” she cried, this time indignantly, and with generous indignation;

“what, even were it possible that you could win your parents’ consent to

marry the child of a man condemned to penal servitude, or, consistently

with the duties a son owes to parents, conceal that fact from them,

could you, born to a station on which every gossip will ask, ‘Who and

what is the name of the future Lady Chillingly?’ believe that the

who and the what will never be discovered! Have you, a mere stranger,

unknown to us a few weeks ago, a right to say to Walter Melville,

‘Resign to me that which is your sole reward for the sublime sacrifices,

for the loyal devotion, for the watchful tenderness of patient years’?”

“Surely, madam,” cried Kenelm, more startled, more shaken in soul by

this appeal, than by the previous revelations, “surely, when we

last parted, when I confided to you my love for your niece, when you

consented to my proposal to return home and obtain my father’s approval

of my suit,--surely then was the time to say, ‘No; a suitor with claims

paramount and irresistible has come before you.’”

“I did not then know, Heaven is my witness, I did not then even suspect,

that Walter Melville ever dreamed of seeking a wife in the child who had

grown up under his eyes. You must own, indeed, how much I discouraged

your suit; I could not discourage it more without revealing the secret

of her birth, only to be revealed as an extreme necessity. But my

persuasion was that your father would not consent to your alliance with

one so far beneath the expectations he was entitled to form, and the

refusal of that consent would terminate all further acquaintance between

you and Lily, leaving her secret undisclosed. It was not till you had

left, only indeed two days ago, that I received a letter from Walter

Melville,--a letter which told me what I had never before conjectured.

Here is the letter, read it, and then say if you have the heart to

force yourself into rivalry, with--with--” She broke off, choked by her

exertion, thrust the letter into his hands, and with keen, eager, hungry

stare watched his countenance while he read.

----- STREET, BLOOMSBURY.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--Joy and triumph! My picture is completed, the picture

on which for so many months I have worked night and day in this den of

a studio, without a glimpse of the green fields, concealing my address

from every one, even from you, lest I might be tempted to suspend my

labours. The picture is completed: it is sold; guess the price! Fifteen

hundred guineas, and to a dealer,--a dealer! Think of that! It is to be

carried about the country exhibited by itself. You remember those three

little landscapes of mine which two years ago I would gladly have sold

for ten pounds, only neither Lily nor you would let me. My good friend

and earliest patron, the German merchant at Luscombe, who called on

me yesterday, offered to cover them with guineas thrice piled over the

canvas. Imagine how happy I felt when I forced him to accept them as a

present. What a leap in a man’s life it is when he can afford to say, “I

give!” Now then, at last, at last I am in a position which justifies the

utterance of the hope which has for eighteen years been my solace, my

support; been the sunbeam that ever shone through the gloom when my fate

was at the darkest; been the melody that buoyed me aloft as in the

song of the skylark, when in the voices of men I heard but the laugh of

scorn. Do you remember the night on which Lily’s mother besought us

to bring up her child in ignorance of her parentage, not even to

communicate to unkind and disdainful relatives that such a child was

born? Do you remember how plaintively, and yet how proudly, she, so

nobly born, so luxuriously nurtured, clasping my hand when I ventured

to remonstrate, and say that her own family could not condemn her child

because of the father’s guilt,--she, the proudest woman I ever knew, she

whose smile I can at rare moments detect in Lily, raised her head from

her pillow, and gasped forth,--

“I am dying: the last words of the dying are commands. I command you to

see that my child’s lot is not that of a felon’s daughter transported to

the hearth of nobles. To be happy, her lot must be humble: no roof too

humble to shelter, no husband too humble to wed, the felon’s daughter.”

From that hour I formed a resolve that I would keep hand and heart

free, that when the grandchild of my princely benefactor grew up into

womanhood I might say to her, “I am humbly born, but thy mother would

have given thee to me.” The newborn, consigned to our charge, has now

ripened into woman, and I have now so assured my fortune that it is

no longer poverty and struggle that I should ask her to share. I am

conscious that, were her fate not so exceptional, this hope of mine

would be a vain presumption,--conscious that I am but the creature

of her grandsire’s bounty, and that from it springs all I ever can

be,--conscious of the disparity in years,-conscious of many a past error

and present fault. But, as fate so ordains, such considerations are

trivial; I am her rightful choice. What other choice, compatible with

these necessities which weigh, dear and honoured friend, immeasurably

more on your sense of honour than they do upon mine? and yet mine is

not dull. Granting, then, that you, her nearest and most responsible

relative, do not contemn me for presumption, all else seems to me clear.

Lily’s childlike affection for me is too deep and too fond not to

warm into a wife’s love. Happily, too, she has not been reared in the

stereotyped boarding-school shallowness of knowledge and vulgarities of

gentility; but educated, like myself, by the free influences of Nature,

longing for no halls and palaces save those that we build as we list, in

fairyland; educated to comprehend and share the fancies which are

more than booklore to the worshipper of art and song. In a day or two,

perhaps the day after you receive this, I shall be able to escape from

London, and most likely shall come on foot as usual. How I long to

see once more the woodbine on the hedgerows, the green blades of the

cornfields, the sunny lapse of the river, and dearer still the tiny

falls of our own little noisy rill! Meanwhile I entreat you, dearest,

gentlest, most honored of such few friends as my life has hitherto won

to itself, to consider well the direct purport of this letter. If you,

born in a grade so much higher than mine, feel that it is unwarrantable

insolence in me to aspire to the hand of my patron’s grandchild, say so

plainly; and I remain not less grateful for your friendship than I was

to your goodness when dining for the first time at your father’s palace.

Shy and sensitive and young, I felt that his grand guests wondered why I

was invited to the same board as themselves. You, then courted, admired,

you had sympathetic compassion on the raw, sullen boy; left those, who

then seemed to me like the gods and goddesses of a heathen Pantheon, to

come and sit beside your father’s protege and cheeringly whisper to

him such words as make a low-born ambitious lad go home light-hearted,

saying to himself, “Some day or other.” And what it is to an ambitious

lad, fancying himself lifted by the gods and goddesses of a Pantheon, to

go home light-hearted muttering to himself, “Some day or other,” I doubt

if even you can divine.

But should you be as kind to the presumptuous man as you were to the

bashful boy, and say, “Realized be the dream, fulfilled be the object of

your life! take from me as her next of kin, the last descendant of your

benefactor,” then I venture to address to you this request. You are in

the place of mother to your sister’s child, act for her as a keeper now,

to prepare her mind and heart for the coming change in the relations

between her and me. When I last saw her, six months ago, she was still

so playfully infantine that it half seems to me I should be sinning

against the reverence due to a child, if I said too abruptly, “You are

woman, and I love you not as child but as woman.” And yet, time is

not allowed to me for long, cautious, and gradual slide from the

relationship of friend into that of lover. I now understand what the

great master of my art once said to me, “A career is a destiny.” By one

of those merchant princes who now at Manchester, as they did once at

Genoa or Venice, reign alike over those two civilizers of the world

which to dull eyes seem antagonistic, Art and Commerce, an offer is made

to me for a picture on a subject which strikes his fancy: an offer so

magnificently liberal that his commerce must command my art; and the

nature of the subject compels me to seek the banks of the Rhine as

soon as may be. I must have all the hues of the foliage in the meridian

glories of summer. I can but stay at Grasmere a very few days; but

before I leave I must know this, am I going to work for Lily or am I

not? On the answer to that question depends all. If not to work for her,

there would be no glory in the summer, no triumph in art to me: I refuse

the offer. If she says, “Yes; it is for me you work,” then she becomes

my destiny. She assures my career. Here I speak as an artist: nobody who

is not an artist can guess how sovereign over even his moral being, at

a certain critical epoch in his career of artist or his life of man,

is the success or the failure of a single work. But I go on to speak as

man. My love for Lily is such for the last six months that, though if

she rejected me I should still serve art, still yearn for fame, it would

be as an old man might do either. The youth of my life would be gone.

As man I say, all my thoughts, all my dreams of happiness, distinct from

Art and fame, are summed up in the one question, “Is Lily to be my wife

or not?”

Yours affectionately,

W. M.

Kenelm returned the letter without a word.

Enraged by his silence, Mrs. Cameron exclaimed, “Now, sir, what say you?

You have scarcely known Lily five weeks. What is the feverish fancy of

five weeks’ growth to the lifelong devotion of a man like this? Do you

now dare to say, ‘I persist’?”

Kenelm waved his hand very quietly, as if to dismiss all conception of

taunt and insult and said with his soft melancholy eyes fixed upon the

working features of Lily’s aunt, “This man is more worthy of her than

I. He prays you, in his letter, to prepare your niece for that change of

relationship which he dreads too abruptly to break to her himself. Have

you done so?”

“I have; the night I got the letter.”

“And--you hesitate; speak truthfully, I implore. And she--”

“She,” answered Mrs. Cameron, feeling herself involuntarily compelled to

obey the voice of that prayer--“she seemed stunned at first, muttering,

‘This is a dream: it cannot be true,--cannot! I Lion’s wife--I--I!

I, his destiny! In me his happiness!’ And then she laughed her pretty

child’s laugh, and put her arms round my neck, and said, ‘You are

jesting, aunty. He could not write thus!’ So I put that part of his

letter under her eyes; and when she had convinced herself, her face

became very grave, more like a woman’s face than I ever saw it; and

after a pause she cried out passionately, ‘Can you think me--can I think

myself--so bad, so ungrateful, as to doubt what I should answer, if

Lion asked me whether I would willingly say or do anything that made him

unhappy? If there be such a doubt in my heart, I would tear it out

by the roots, heart and all!’ Oh, Mr. Chillingly! There would be no

happiness for her with another, knowing that she had blighted the life

of him to whom she owes so much, though she never will learn how

much more she owes.” Kenelm not replying to this remark, Mrs. Cameron

resumed, “I will be perfectly frank with you, Mr. Chillingly. I was not

quite satisfied with Lily’s manner and looks the next morning, that is,

yesterday. I did fear there might be some struggle in her mind in which

there entered a thought of yourself. And when Walter, on his arrival

here in the evening, spoke of you as one he had met before in his rural

excursions, but whose name he only learned on parting at the bridge by

Cromwell Lodge, I saw that Lily turned pale, and shortly afterwards

went to her own room for the night. Fearing that any interview with you,

though it would not alter her resolve, might lessen her happiness on

the only choice she can and ought to adopt, I resolved to visit you this

morning, and make that appeal to your reason and your heart which I have

done now,--not, I am sure, in vain. Hush! I hear his voice!”

Melville entered the room, Lily leaning on his arm. The artist’s comely

face was radiant with ineffable joyousness. Leaving Lily, he reached

Kenelm’s side as with a single bound, shook him heartily by the hand,

saying, “I find that you have already been a welcomed visitor in this

house. Long may you be so, so say I, so (I answer for her) says my fair

betrothed, to whom I need not present you.”

Lily advanced, and held out her hand very timidly. Kenelm touched rather

than clasped it. His own strong hand trembled like a leaf. He ventured

but one glance at her face. All the bloom had died out of it, but the

expression seemed to him wondrously, cruelly tranquil.

“Your betrothed! your future bride!” he said to the artist, with a

mastery over his emotion rendered less difficult by the single glance

at that tranquil face. “I wish you joy. All happiness to you, Miss

Mordaunt. You have made a noble choice.”

He looked round for his hat; it lay at his feet, but he did not see

it; his eyes wandering away with uncertain vision, like those of a

sleep-walker.

Mrs. Cameron picked up the hat and gave it to him.

“Thank you,” he said meekly; then with a smile half sweet, half bitter,

“I have so much to thank you for, Mrs. Cameron.”

“But you are not going already,--just as I enter too. Hold! Mrs. Cameron

tells me you are lodging with my old friend Jones. Come and stop a

couple of days with us: we can find you a room; the room over your

butterfly cage, eh, Fairy?”

“Thank you too. Thank you all. No; I must be in London by the first

train.”

Speaking thus, he had found his way to the door, bowed with the quiet

grace that characterized all his movements, and was gone.

“Pardon his abruptness, Lily; he too loves; he too is impatient to

find a betrothed,” said the artist gayly: “but now he knows my dearest

secret, I think I have a right to know his; and I will try.”

He had scarcely uttered the words before he too had quitted the room and

overtaken Kenelm just at the threshold.

“If you are going back to Cromwell Lodge,--to pack up, I suppose,--let

me walk with you as far as the bridge.”

Kenelm inclined his head assentingly and tacitly as they passed through

the garden-gate, winding backwards through the lane which skirted the

garden pales; when, at the very spot in which the day after their first

and only quarrel Lily’s face had been seen brightening through the

evergreen, that day on which the old woman, quitting her, said, “God

bless you!” and on which the vicar, walking with Kenelm, spoke of her

fairy charms; well, just in that spot Lily’s face appeared again, not

this time brightening through the evergreens, unless the palest gleam

of the palest moon can be said to brighten. Kenelm saw, started, halted.

His companion, then in the rush of a gladsome talk, of which Kenelm had

not heard a word, neither saw nor halted; he walked on mechanically,

gladsome, and talking.

Lily stretched forth her hand through the evergreens. Kenelm took it

reverentially. This time it was not his hand that trembled.

“Good-by,” she said in a whisper, “good-by forever in this world. You

understand,--you do understand me. Say that you do.”

“I understand. Noble child! noble choice! God bless you! God comfort

me!” murmured Kenelm. Their eyes met. Oh, the sadness; and, alas! oh the

love in the eyes of both!

Kenelm passed on.

All said in an instant. How many Alls are said in an instant! Melville

was in the midst of some glowing sentence, begun when Kenelm dropped

from his side, and the end of the sentence was this:

“Words cannot say how fair seems life; how easy seems conquest of fame,

dating from this day--this day”--and in his turn he halted, looked round

on the sunlit landscape, and breathed deep, as if to drink into his soul

all of the earth’s joy and beauty which his gaze could compass and the

arch of the horizon bound.

“They who knew her even the best,” resumed the artist, striding on,

“even her aunt, never could guess how serious and earnest, under all

her infantine prettiness of fancy, is that girl’s real nature. We were

walking along the brook-side, when I began to tell how solitary the

world would be to me if I could not win her to my side; while I spoke

she had turned aside from the path we had taken, and it was not till we

were under the shadow of the church in which we shall be married that

she uttered the word that gives to every cloud in my fate the silver

lining; implying thus how solemnly connected in her mind was the thought

of love with the sanctity of religion.”

Kenelm shuddered,--the church, the burial-ground, the old Gothic tomb,

the flowers round the infant’s grave!

“But I am talking a great deal too much about myself,” resumed the

artist. “Lovers are the most consummate of all egotists, and the

most garrulous of all gossips. You have wished me joy on my destined

nuptials, when shall I wish you joy on yours? Since we have begun to

confide in each other, you are in my debt as to a confidence.”

They had now gained the bridge. Kenelm turned round abruptly, “Good-day;

let us part here. I have nothing to confide to you that might not seem

to your ears a mockery when I wish you joy.” So saying, so obeying in

spite of himself the anguish of his heart, Kenelm wrung his companion’s

hand with the force of an uncontrollable agony, and speeded over the

bridge before Melville recovered his surprise.

The artist would have small claim to the essential attribute of

genius--namely, the intuitive sympathy of passion with passion--if that

secret of Kenelm’s which he had so lightly said “he had acquired the

right to learn,” was not revealed to him as by an electric flash. “Poor

fellow!” he said to himself pityingly; “how natural that he should fall

in love with Fairy! but happily he is so young, and such a philosopher,

that it is but one of those trials through which, at least ten times a

year, I have gone with wounds that leave not a scar.”

Thus soliloquizing, the warm-blooded worshipper of Nature returned

homeward, too blest in the triumph of his own love to feel more than a

kindly compassion for the wounded heart, consigned with no doubt of

the healing result to the fickleness of youth and the consolations of

philosophy. Not for a moment did the happier rival suspect that Kenelm’s

love was returned; that an atom in the heart of the girl who had

promised to be his bride could take its light or shadow from any love

but his own. Yet, more from delicacy of respect to the rival so suddenly

self-betrayed than from any more prudential motive, he did not speak

even to Mrs. Cameron of Kenelm’s secret and sorrow; and certainly

neither she nor Lily was disposed to ask any question that concerned the

departed visitor.

In fact the name of Kenelm Chillingly was scarcely, if at all, mentioned

in that household during the few days which elapsed before Walter

Melville quitted Grasmere for the banks of the Rhine, not to return till

the autumn, when his marriage with Lily was to take place. During

those days Lily was calm and seemingly cheerful; her manner towards

her betrothed, if more subdued, not less affectionate than of old.

Mrs. Cameron congratulated herself on having so successfully got rid of

Kenelm Chillingly.

CHAPTER VIII.

SO, then, but for that officious warning, uttered under the balcony

at Luscombe, Kenelm Chillingly might never have had a rival in Walter

Melville. But ill would any reader construe the character of Kenelm, did

he think that such a thought increased the bitterness of his sorrow.

No sorrow in the thought that a noble nature had been saved from the

temptation to a great sin.

The good man does good merely by living. And the good he does may often

mar the plans he formed for his own happiness. But he cannot regret that

Heaven has permitted him to do good.

What Kenelm did feel is perhaps best explained in the letter to Sir

Peter, which is here subjoined:--

“MY DEAREST FATHER,--Never till my dying day shall I forget that

tender desire for my happiness with which, overcoming all worldly

considerations, no matter at what disappointment to your own cherished

plans or ambition for the heir to your name and race, you sent me

away from your roof, these words ringing in my ear like the sound of

joy-bells, ‘Choose as you will, with my blessing on your choice. I open

my heart to admit another child: your wife shall be my daughter.’ It

is such an unspeakable comfort to me to recall those words now. Of all

human affections gratitude is surely the holiest; and it blends itself

with the sweetness of religion when it is gratitude to a father. And,

therefore, do not grieve too much for me, when I tell you that the hopes

which enchanted me when we parted are not to be fulfilled. Her hand is

pledged to another,--another with claims upon her preference to which

mine cannot be compared; and he is himself, putting aside the accidents

of birth and fortune, immeasurably my superior. In that thought--I mean

the thought that the man she selects deserves her more than I do, and

that in his happiness she will blend her own--I shall find comfort, so

soon as I can fairly reason down the first all-engrossing selfishness

that follows the sense of unexpected and irremediable loss. Meanwhile

you will think it not unnatural that I resort to such aids for change

of heart as are afforded by change of scene. I start for the Continent

to-night, and shall not rest till I reach Venice, which I have not yet

seen. I feel irresistibly attracted towards still canals and gliding

gondolas. I will write to you and to my dear mother the day I arrive.

And I trust to write cheerfully, with full accounts of all I see and

encounter. Do not, dearest father, in your letters to me, revert or

allude to that grief which even the tenderest word from your own tender

self might but chafe into pain more sensitive. After all, a disappointed

love is a very common lot. And we meet every day, men--ay, and women

too--who have known it, and are thoroughly cured. The manliest of our

modern lyrical poets has said very nobly, and, no doubt, very justly,

“To bear is to conquer our fate.

“Ever your loving son,

“K. C.”

CHAPTER IX.

NEARLY a year and a half has elapsed since the date of my last chapter.

Two Englishmen were--the one seated, the other reclined at length--on

one of the mounds that furrow the ascent of Posilippo. Before them

spread the noiseless sea, basking in the sunshine, without visible

ripple; to the left there was a distant glimpse through gaps of

brushwood of the public gardens and white water of the Chiaja. They were

friends who had chanced to meet abroad unexpectedly, joined company, and

travelled together for many months, chiefly in the East. They had been

but a few days in Naples. The elder of the two had important affairs in

England which ought to have summoned him back long since. But he did not

let his friend know this; his affairs seemed to him less important than

the duties he owed to one for whom he entertained that deep and noble

love which is something stronger than brotherly, for with brotherly

affection it combines gratitude and reverence. He knew, too, that

his friend was oppressed by a haunting sorrow, of which the cause was

divined by one, not revealed by the other.

To leave him, so beloved, alone with that sorrow in strange lands, was a

thought not to be cherished by a friend so tender; for in the friendship

of this man there was that sort of tenderness which completes a nature,

thoroughly manlike, by giving it a touch of the woman’s.

It was a day which in our northern climates is that of winter: in the

southern clime of Naples it was mild as an English summer day, lingering

on the brink of autumn; the sun sloping towards the west, and already

gathering around it roseate and purple fleeces; elsewhere the deep blue

sky was without a cloudlet.

Both had been for some minutes silent; at length the man reclining on

the grass--it was the younger man--said suddenly, and with no previous

hint of the subject introduced, “Lay your hand on your heart, Tom, and

answer me truly. Are your thoughts as clear from regrets as the heavens

above us are from a cloud? Man takes regret from tears that have ceased

to flow, as the heavens take clouds from the rains that have ceased to

fall.”

“Regrets? Ah, I understand, for the loss of the girl I once loved to

distraction! No; surely I made that clear to you many, many, many months

ago, when I was your guest at Moleswich.”

“Ay, but I have never, since then, spoken to you on that subject. I did

not dare. It seems to me so natural that a man, in the earlier struggle

between love and reason, should say, ‘Reason shall conquer, and

has conquered;’ and yet--and yet--as time glides on, feel that the

conquerors who cannot put down rebellion have a very uneasy reign.

Answer me not as at Moleswich, during the first struggle, but now, in

the after-day, when reaction from struggle comes.”

“Upon my honour,” answered the friend, “I have had no reaction at all.

I was cured entirely, when I had once seen Jessie again, another man’s

wife, mother to his child, happy in her marriage; and, whether she was

changed or not,--very different from the sort of wife I should like to

marry, now that I am no longer a village farrier.”

“And, I remember, you spoke of some other girl whom it would suit you

to marry. You have been long abroad from her. Do you ever think of

her,--think of her still as your future wife? Can you love her? Can you,

who have once loved so faithfully, love again?”

“I am sure of that. I love Emily better than I did when I left England.

We correspond. She writes such nice letters.” Tom hesitated, blushed,

and continued timidly, “I should like to show you one of her letters.”

“Do.”

Tom drew forth the last of such letters from his breast-pocket.

Kenelm raised himself from the grass, took the letter, and read slowly,

carefully, while Tom watched in vain for some approving smile to

brighten up the dark beauty of that melancholy face.

Certainly it was the letter a man in love might show with pride to a

friend: the letter of a lady, well educated, well brought up, evincing

affection modestly, intelligence modestly too; the sort of letter in

which a mother who loved her daughter, and approved the daughter’s

choice, could not have suggested a correction.

As Kenelm gave back the letter, his eyes met his friend’s. Those were

eager eyes,--eyes hungering for praise. Kenelm’s heart smote him for

that worst of sins in friendship,--want of sympathy; and that uneasy

heart forced to his lips congratulations, not perhaps quite sincere, but

which amply satisfied the lover. In uttering them, Kenelm rose to his

feet, threw his arm round his friend’s shoulder, and said, “Are you not

tired of this place, Tom? I am. Let us go back to England to-morrow.”

Tom’s honest face brightened vividly. “How selfish and egotistical I

have been!” continued Kenelm; “I ought to have thought more of you, your

career, your marriage,--pardon me--”

“Pardon you,--pardon! Don’t I owe to you all,--owe to you Emily herself?

If you had never come to Graveleigh, never said, ‘Be my friend,’ what

should I have been now? what--what?”

The next day the two friends quitted Naples _en route_ for England, not

exchanging many words by the way. The old loquacious crotchety humour

of Kenelm had deserted him. A duller companion than he was you could not

have conceived. He might have been the hero of a young lady’s novel.

It was only when they parted in London, that Kenelm evinced more secret

purpose, more external emotion than one of his heraldic Daces shifting

from the bed to the surface of a waveless pond.

“If I have rightly understood you, Tom, all this change in you, all this

cure of torturing regret, was wrought, wrought lastingly,--wrought so as

to leave you heart-free for the world’s actions and a home’s peace, on

that eve when you saw her whose face till then had haunted you, another

man’s happy wife, and in so seeing her, either her face was changed or

your heart became so.”

“Quite true. I might express it otherwise, but the fact remains the

same.”

“God bless you, Tom; bless you in your career without, in your home

within,” said Kenelm, wringing his friend’s hand at the door of the

carriage that was to whirl to love and wealth and station the whilom

bully of a village, along the iron groove of that contrivance which,

though now the tritest of prosaic realities, seemed once too poetical

for a poet’s wildest visions.

CHAPTER X.

A WINTER’S evening at Moleswich. Very different from a winter sunset

at Naples. It is intensely cold. There has been a slight fall of snow,

accompanied with severe, bright, clean frost, a thin sprinkling of white

on the pavements. Kenelm Chillingly entered the town on foot, no longer

a knapsack on his back. Passing through the main street, he paused a

moment at the door of Will Somers. The shop was closed. No, he would

not stay there to ask in a roundabout way for news. He would go in

straightforwardly and manfully to Grasmere. He would take the inmates

there by surprise. The sooner he could bring Tom’s experience home

to himself, the better. He had schooled his heart to rely on that

experience, and it brought him back the old elasticity of his stride.

In his lofty carriage and buoyant face were again visible the old

haughtiness of the indifferentism that keeps itself aloof from the

turbulent emotions and conventional frivolities of those whom its

philosophy pities and scorns.

“Ha! ha!” laughed he who like Swift never laughed aloud, and often

laughed inaudibly. “Ha! ha! I shall exorcise the ghost of my grief. I

shall never be haunted again. If that stormy creature whom love might

have maddened into crime, if he were cured of love at once by a single

visit to the home of her whose face was changed to him,--for the smiles

and the tears of it had become the property of another man,--how much

more should I be left without a scar! I, the heir of the Chillinglys!

I, the kinsman of a Mivers! I, the pupil of a Welby! I--I, Kenelm

Chillingly, to be thus--thus--” Here, in the midst of his boastful

soliloquy, the well-remembered brook rushed suddenly upon eye and ear,

gleaming and moaning under the wintry moon. Kenelm Chillingly stopped,

covered his face with his hands, and burst into a passion of tears.

Recovering himself slowly, he went on along the path, every step of

which was haunted by the form of Lily. He reached the garden gate of

Grasmere, lifted the latch, and entered. As he did so, a man, touching

his hat, rushed beside, and advanced before him,--the village postman.

Kenelm drew back, allowing the man to pass to the door, and as he thus

drew back, he caught a side view of lighted windows looking on the

lawn,--the windows of the pleasant drawing-room in which he had first

heard Lily speak of her guardian.

The postman left his letters, and regained the garden gate, while

Kenelm still stood wistfully gazing on those lighted windows. He had,

meanwhile, advanced along the whitened sward to the light, saying to

himself, “Let me just see her and her happiness, and then I will knock

boldly at the door, and say, ‘Good-evening, Mrs. Melville.’”

So Kenelm stole across the lawn, and, stationing himself at the angle of

the wall, looked into the window.

Melville, in dressing-robe and slippers, was seated alone by the

fireside. His dog was lazily stretched on the hearth rug. One by one the

features of the room, as the scene of his vanished happiness, grew out

from its stillness; the delicately tinted walls, the dwarf bookcase,

with its feminine ornaments on the upper shelf; the piano standing in

the same place. Lily’s own small low chair; that was not in its old

place, but thrust into a remote angle, as if it had passed into disuse.

Melville was reading a letter, no doubt one of those which the postman

had left. Surely the contents were pleasant, for his fair face, always

frankly expressive of emotion, brightened wonderfully as he read on.

Then he rose with a quick, brisk movement, and pulled the bell hastily.

A neat maid-servant entered,--a strange face to Kenelm. Melville gave

her some brief message. “He has had joyous news,” thought Kenelm. “He

has sent for his wife that she may share his joy.” Presently the door

opened, and entered not Lily, but Mrs. Cameron.

She looked changed. Her natural quietude of mien and movement the same,

indeed, but with more languor in it. Her hair had become gray. Melville

was standing by the table as she approached him. He put the letter into

her hands with a gay, proud smile, and looked over her shoulder while

she read it, pointing with his finger as to some lines that should more

emphatically claim her attention.

When she had finished her face reflected his smile. They exchanged a

hearty shake of the hand, as if in congratulation.

“Ah,” thought Kenelm, “the letter is from Lily. She is abroad. Perhaps

the birth of a first-born.”

Just then Blanche, who had not been visible before, emerged from under

the table, and as Melville reseated himself by the fireside, sprang into

his lap, rubbing herself against his breast. The expression of his face

changed; he uttered some low exclamation. Mrs. Cameron took the creature

from his lap, stroking it quietly, carried it across the room, and put

it outside the door. Then she seated herself beside the artist, placing

her hand in his, and they conversed in low tones, till Melville’s face

again grew bright, and again he took up the letter.

A few minutes later the maid-servant entered with the tea-things,

and after arranging them on the table approached the window. Kenelm

retreated into the shade, the servant closed the shutters and drew the

curtains; that scene of quiet home comfort vanished from the eyes of the

looker-on.

Kenelm felt strangely perplexed. What had become of Lily? was she indeed

absent from her home? Had he conjectured rightly that the letter

which had evidently so gladdened Melville was from her, or was

it possible--here a thought of joy seized his heart and held him

breathless--was it possible that, after all, she had not married her

guardian; had found a home elsewhere,--was free? He moved on farther

down the lawn, towards the water, that he might better bring before his

sight that part of the irregular building in which Lily formerly had her

sleeping-chamber, and her “own-own room.”

All was dark there; the shutters inexorably closed. The place with which

the childlike girl had associated her most childlike fancies, taming and

tending the honey-drinkers destined to pass into fairies, that fragile

tenement was not closed against the winds and snows; its doors were

drearily open; gaps in the delicate wire-work; of its dainty draperies a

few tattered shreds hanging here and there; and on the depopulated floor

the moonbeams resting cold and ghostly. No spray from the tiny fountain;

its basin chipped and mouldering; the scanty waters therein frozen. Of

all the pretty wild ones that Lily fancied she could tame, not one. Ah!

yes, there was one, probably not of the old familiar number; a stranger

that might have crept in for shelter from the first blasts of

winter, and now clung to an angle in the farther wall, its wings

folded,--asleep, not dead. But Kenelm saw it not; he noticed only the

general desolation of the spot.

“Natural enough,” thought he. “She has outgrown all such pretty

silliness. A wife cannot remain a child. Still, if she had belonged to

me--” The thought choked even his inward, unspoken utterance. He turned

away, paused a moment under the leafless boughs of the great willow

still dipping into the brook, and then with impatient steps strode back

towards the garden gate.

“No,--no,--no. I cannot now enter that house and ask for Mrs. Melville.

Trial enough for one night to stand on the old ground. I will return to

the town. I will call at Jessie’s, and there I can learn if she indeed

be happy.”

So he went on by the path along the brook-side, the night momently

colder and colder, and momently clearer and clearer, while the moon

noiselessly glided into loftier heights. Wrapped in his abstracted

thoughts, when he came to the spot in which the path split in twain,

he did not take that which led more directly to the town. His steps,

naturally enough following the train of his thoughts, led him along

the path with which the object of his thoughts was associated. He found

himself on the burial-ground, and in front of the old ruined tomb with

the effaced inscription.

“Ah! child! child!” he murmured almost audibly, “what depths of woman

tenderness lay concealed in thee! In what loving sympathy with the

past--sympathy only vouchsafed to the tenderest women and the highest

poets--didst thou lay thy flowers on the tomb, to which thou didst give

a poet’s history interpreted by a woman’s heart, little dreaming that

beneath the stone slept a hero of thine own fallen race.”

He passed beneath the shadow of the yews, whose leaves no winter wind

can strew, and paused at the ruined tomb,--no flower now on its stone,

only a sprinkling of snow at the foot of it,--sprinklings of snow at the

foot of each humbler grave-mound. Motionless in the frosty air rested

the pointed church-spire, and through the frosty air, higher and higher

up the arch of heaven, soared the unpausing moon. Around and below and

above her, the stars which no science can number; yet not less difficult

to number are the thoughts, desires, aspirations which, in a space of

time briefer than a winter’s night, can pass through the infinite deeps

of a human soul.

From his stand by the Gothic tomb, Kenelm looked along the churchyard

for the infant’s grave which Lily’s pious care had bordered with votive

flowers. Yes, in that direction there was still a gleam of colour; could

it be of flowers in that biting winter time?--the moon is so deceptive,

it silvers into the hue of the jessamines the green of the everlastings.

He passed towards the white grave-mound. His sight had duped him; no

pale flower, no green “everlasting” on its neglected border,--only brown

mould, withered stalks, streaks of snow.

“And yet,” he said sadly, “she told me she had never broken a promise;

and she had given a promise to the dying child. Ah! she is too happy now

to think of the dead.”

So murmuring, he was about to turn towards the town, when close by

that child’s grave he saw another. Round that other there were pale

“everlastings,” dwarfed blossoms of the laurestinus; at the four angles

the drooping bud of a Christmas rose; at the head of the grave was a

white stone, its sharp edges cutting into the starlit air; and on the

head, in fresh letters, were inscribed these words:--

To the Memory of

L. M.

Aged 17,

Died October 29, A. D. 18--,

This stone, above the grave to which her mortal

remains are consigned, beside that of an infant not

more sinless, is consecrated by those who

most mourn and miss her,

ISABEL CAMERON,

WALTER MELVILLE.

“Suffer the little children to come unto me.”

CHAPTER XI.

THE next morning Mr. Emlyn, passing from his garden to the town of

Moleswich, descried a human form stretched on the burial-ground,

stirring restlessly but very slightly, as if with an involuntary shiver,

and uttering broken sounds, very faintly heard, like the moans that a

man in pain strives to suppress and cannot.

The rector hastened to the spot. The man was lying, his face downward,

on a grave-mound, not dead, not asleep.

“Poor fellow overtaken by drink, I fear,” thought the gentle pastor; and

as it was the habit of his mind to compassionate error even more than

grief, he accosted the supposed sinner in very soothing tones--trying to

raise him from the ground--and with very kindly words.

Then the man lifted his face from its pillow on the grave-mound, looked

round him dreamily into the gray, blank air of the cheerless morn,

and rose to his feet quietly and slowly. The vicar was startled; he

recognized the face of him he had last seen in the magnificent affluence

of health and strength. But the character of the face was changed,--so

changed! its old serenity of expression, at once grave and sweet,

succeeded by a wild trouble in the heavy eyelids and trembling lips.

“Mr. Chillingly,--you! Is it possible?”

“Varus, Varus,” exclaimed Kenelm, passionately, “what hast thou done

with my legions?”

At that quotation of the well-known greeting of Augustus to his

unfortunate general, the scholar recoiled. Had his young friend’s mind

deserted him,--dazed, perhaps, by over-study?

He was soon reassured; Kenelm’s face settled back into calm, though a

dreary calm, like that of the wintry day.

“I beg pardon, Mr. Emlyn; I had not quite shaken off the hold of a

strange dream. I dreamed that I was worse off than Augustus: he did not

lose the world when the legions he had trusted to another vanished into

a grave.”

Here Kenelm linked his arm in that of the rector,--on which he leaned

rather heavily,--and drew him on from the burial-ground into the open

space where the two paths met.

“But how long have you returned to Moleswich?” asked Emlyn; “and how

came you to choose so damp a bed for your morning slumbers?”

“The wintry cold crept into my veins when I stood in the burial-ground,

and I was very weary; I had no sleep at night. Do not let me take you

out of your way; I am going on to Grasmere. So I see, by the record on a

gravestone, that it is more than a year ago since Mr. Melville lost his

wife.”

“Wife? He never married.”

“What!” cried Kenelm. “Whose, then, is that gravestone,--‘L. M.’?”

“Alas! it is our poor Lily’s.”

“And she died unmarried?”

As Kenelm said this he looked up, and the sun broke out from the

gloomy haze of the morning. “I may claim thee, then,” he thought within

himself, “claim thee as mine when we meet again.”

“Unmarried,--yes,” resumed the vicar. “She was indeed betrothed to her

guardian; they were to have been married in the autumn, on his return

from the Rhine. He went there to paint on the spot itself his great

picture, which is now so famous,--‘Roland, the Hermit Knight, looking

towards the convent lattice for a sight of the Holy Nun.’ Melville had

scarcely gone before the symptoms of the disease which proved fatal to

poor Lily betrayed themselves; they baffled all medical skill,--rapid

decline. She was always very delicate, but no one detected in her the

seeds of consumption. Melville only returned a day or two before her

death. Dear childlike Lily! how we all mourned for her!--not least the

poor, who believed in her fairy charms.”

“And least of all, it appears, the man she was to have married.”

“He?--Melville? How can you wrong him so? His grief was

intense--overpowering--for the time.”

“For the time! what time?” muttered Kenelm, in tones too low for the

pastor’s ear.

They moved on silently. Mr. Emlyn resumed,--

“You noticed the text on Lily’s gravestone--‘Suffer the little children

to come unto me’? She dictated it herself the day before she died. I was

with her then, so I was at the last.”

“Were you--were you--at the last--the last? Good-day, Mr. Emlyn; we

are just in sight of the garden gate. And--excuse me--I wish to see Mr.

Melville alone.”

“Well, then, good-day; but if you are making any stay in the

neighbourhood, will you not be our guest? We have a room at your

service.”

“I thank you gratefully; but I return to London in an hour or so. Hold,

a moment. You were with her at the last? She was resigned to die?”

“Resigned! that is scarcely the word. The smile left upon her lips was

not that of human resignation: it was the smile of a divine joy.”

CHAPTER XII.

“YES, sir, Mr. Melville is at home in his studio.”

Kenelm followed the maid across the hall into a room not built at the

date of Kenelm’s former visits to the house: the artist, making Grasmere

his chief residence after Lily’s death, had added it at the back of

the neglected place wherein Lily had encaged “the souls of infants

unbaptized.”

A lofty room, with a casement partially darkened, to the bleak north;

various sketches on the walls; gaunt specimens of antique furniture,

and of gorgeous Italian silks, scattered about in confused disorder;

one large picture on its easel curtained; another as large, and half

finished, before which stood the painter. He turned quickly, as Kenelm

entered the room unannounced, let fall brush and palette, came up to him

eagerly, grasped his hand, drooped his head on Kenelm’s shoulder, and

said, in a voice struggling with evident and strong emotion,--

“Since we parted, such grief! such a loss!”

“I know it; I have seen her grave. Let us not speak of it. Why

so needlessly revive your sorrow? So--so--your sanguine hopes are

fulfilled: the world at last has done you justice? Emlyn tells me that

you have painted a very famous picture.”

Kenelm had seated himself as he thus spoke. The painter still stood with

dejected attitude on the middle of the floor, and brushed his hand

over his moistened eyes once or twice before he answered, “Yes, wait a

moment, don’t talk of fame yet. Bear with me. The sudden sight of you

unnerved me.”

The artist here seated himself also on an old worm-eaten Gothic chest,

rumpling and chafing the golden or tinselled threads of the embroidered

silk, so rare and so time-worn, flung over the Gothic chest, so rare

also, and so worm-eaten.

Kenelm looked through half-closed lids at the artist, and his lips,

before slightly curved with a secret scorn, became gravely compressed.

In Melville’s struggle to conceal emotion the strong man recognized a

strong man,--recognized, and yet only wondered; wondered how such a man,

to whom Lily had pledged her hand, could so soon after the loss of Lily

go on painting pictures, and care for any praise bestowed on a yard of

canvas.

In a very few minutes Melville recommenced conversation,--no more

reference to Lily than if she had never existed. “Yes, my last picture

has been indeed a success,--a reward complete, if tardy, for all the

bitterness of former struggles made in vain, for the galling sense of

injustice, the anguish of which only an artist knows, when unworthy

rivals are ranked before him.

“‘Foes quick to blame, and friends afraid to praise.’

“True that I have still much to encounter; the cliques still seek to

disparage me, but between me and the cliques there stands at last the

giant form of the public, and at last critics of graver weight than the

cliques have deigned to accord to me a higher rank than even the public

yet acknowledge. Ah, Mr. Chillingly, you do not profess to be a judge of

paintings, but, excuse me, just look at this letter. I received it

only last night from the greatest connoisseur of my art, certainly in

England, perhaps in Europe.” Here Melville drew, from the side-pocket

of his picturesque _moyen age_ surtout, a letter signed by a name

authoritative to all who, being painters themselves, acknowledge

authority in one who could no more paint a picture himself than Addison,

the ablest critic of the greatest poem modern Europe has produced, could

have written ten lines of the “Paradise Lost,” and thrust the letter

into Kenelm’s hand. Kenelm read it listlessly, with an increased

contempt for an artist who could so find in gratified vanity consolation

for the life gone from earth. But, listlessly as he read the letter, the

sincere and fervent enthusiasm of the laudatory contents impressed him,

and the preeminent authority of the signature could not be denied.

The letter was written on the occasion of Melville’s recent election to

the dignity of R. A., successor to a very great artist whose death had

created a vacancy in the Academy. He returned the letter to Melville,

saying, “This is the letter I saw you reading last night as I looked

in at your window. Indeed, for a man who cares for the opinion of other

men, this letter is very flattering; and for the painter who cares for

money, it must be very pleasant to know by how many guineas every inch

of his canvas may be covered.” Unable longer to control his passions of

rage, of scorn, of agonizing grief, Kenelm then burst forth: “Man, man,

whom I once accepted as a teacher on human life,--a teacher to warm, to

brighten, to exalt mine own indifferent, dreamy, slow-pulsed self! has

not the one woman whom thou didst select out of this overcrowded world

to be bone of thy bone, flesh of thy flesh, vanished evermore from the

earth,--little more than a year since her voice was silenced, her heart

ceased to beat? But how slight is such loss to thy life compared to the

worth of a compliment that flatters thy vanity!”

The artist rose to his feet with an indignant impulse. But the angry

flush faded from his cheek as he looked on the countenance of his

rebuker. He walked up to him, and attempted to take his hand, but Kenelm

snatched it scornfully from his grasp.

“Poor friend,” said Melville, sadly and soothingly, “I did not think you

loved her thus deeply. Pardon me.” He drew a chair close to Kenelm’s,

and after a brief pause went on thus, in very earnest tones, “I am not

so heartless, not so forgetful of my loss as you suppose. But reflect,

you have but just learned of her death, you are under the first shock of

grief. More than a year has been given to me for gradual submission to

the decree of Heaven. Now listen to me, and try to listen calmly. I

am many years older than you: I ought to know better the conditions

on which man holds the tenure of life. Life is composite, many-sided:

nature does not permit it to be lastingly monopolized by a single

passion, or while yet in the prime of its strength to be lastingly

blighted by a single sorrow. Survey the great mass of our common race,

engaged in the various callings, some the humblest, some the loftiest,

by which the business of the world is carried on,--can you justly

despise as heartless the poor trader, or the great statesman, when it

may be but a few days after the loss of some one nearest and dearest to

his heart, the trader reopens his shop, the statesman reappears in his

office? But in me, the votary of art, in me you behold but the weakness

of gratified vanity; if I feel joy in the hope that my art may triumph,

and my country may add my name to the list of those who contribute to

her renown, where and when ever lived an artist not sustained by that

hope, in privation, in sickness, in the sorrows he must share with his

kind? Nor is this hope that of a feminine vanity, a sicklier craving for

applause; it identifies itself with glorious services to our land, to

our race, to the children of all after time. Our art cannot triumph, our

name cannot live, unless we achieve a something that tends to beautify

or ennoble the world in which we accept the common heritage of toil and

of sorrow, in order therefrom to work out for successive multitudes a

recreation and a joy.”

While the artist thus spoke Kenelm lifted towards his face eyes charged

with suppressed tears. And the face, kindling as the artist vindicated

himself from the young man’s bitter charge, became touchingly sweet in

its grave expression at the close of the not ignoble defence.

“Enough,” said Kenelm, rising. “There is a ring of truth in what you

say. I can conceive the artist’s, the poet’s escape from this world,

when all therein is death and winter, into the world he creates and

colours at his will with the hues of summer. So, too, I can conceive

how the man whose life is sternly fitted into the grooves of a trader’s

calling, or a statesman’s duties, is borne on by the force of custom,

afar from such brief halting-spot as a grave. But I am no poet, no

artist, no trader, no statesman; I have no calling, my life is fixed

into no grooves. Adieu.”

“Hold a moment. Not now, but somewhat later, ask yourself whether any

life can be permitted to wander in space, a monad detached from the

lives of others. Into some groove or other, sooner or later, it

must settle, and be borne on obedient to the laws of Nature and the

responsibility to God.”

CHAPTER XIII

KENELM went back alone, and with downcast looks, through the desolate,

flowerless garden, when at the other side of the gate a light touch was

laid on his arm. He looked up, and recognized Mrs. Cameron.

“I saw you,” she said, “from my window coming to the house, and I have

been waiting for you here. I wished to speak to you alone. Allow me to

walk beside you.”’

Kenelm inclined his head assentingly, but made no answer. They were

nearly midway between the cottage and the burial-ground when Mrs.

Cameron resumed, her tones quick and agitated, contrasting her habitual

languid quietude,--

“I have a great weight on my mind; it ought not to be remorse. I acted

as I thought in my conscience for the best. But oh, Mr. Chillingly, if I

erred,--if I judged wrongly, do say you at least forgive me.” She seized

his hand, pressing it convulsively. Kenelm muttered inaudibly: a sort

of dreary stupor had succeeded to the intense excitement of grief. Mrs.

Cameron went on,--

“You could not have married Lily; you know you could not. The secret of

her birth could not, in honour, have been concealed from your parents.

They could not have consented to your marriage; and even if you had

persisted, without that consent and in spite of that secret, to press

for it,--even had she been yours--”

“Might she not be living now?” cried Kenelm, fiercely.

“No,--no; the secret must have come out. The cruel world would have

discovered it; it would have reached her ears. The shame of it would

have killed her. How bitter then would have been her short interval of

life! As it is, she passed away,--resigned and happy. But I own that I

did not, could not, understand her, could not believe her feeling for

you to be so deep. I did think that when she knew her own heart she

would find that love for her guardian was its strongest affection. She

assented, apparently without a pang, to become his wife; and she seemed

always so fond of him, and what girl would not be? But I was mistaken,

deceived. From the day you saw her last, she began to fade away; but

then Walter left a few days after, and I thought that it was his absence

she mourned. She never owned to me that it was yours,--never till too

late,--too late,--just when my sad letter had summoned him back, only

three days before she died. Had I known earlier, while yet there was

hope of recovery, I must have written to you, even though the obstacles

to your union with her remained the same. Oh, again I implore you, say

that if I erred you forgive me. She did, kissing me so tenderly. She did

forgive me. Will not you? It would have been her wish.”

“Her wish? Do you think I could disobey it? I know not if I have

anything to forgive. If I have, now could I not forgive one who loved

her? God comfort us both.”

He bent down and kissed Mrs. Cameron’s forehead. The poor woman threw

her arm gratefully, lovingly round him, and burst into tears.

When she had recovered her emotion, she said,--

“And now, it is with so much lighter a heart that I can fulfil her

commission to you. But, before I place this in your hands, can you

make me one promise? Never tell Melville how she loved you. She was so

careful he should never guess that. And if he knew it was the thought of

union with him which had killed her, he would never smile again.”

“You would not ask such a promise if you could guess how sacred from all

the world I hold the secret that you confide to me. By that secret

the grave is changed into an altar. Our bridals now are only a while

deferred.”

Mrs. Cameron placed a letter in Kenelm’s hand, and murmuring in accents

broken by a sob, “She gave it to me the day before her last,” left him,

and with quick vacillating steps hurried back towards the cottage. She

now understood him, at last, too well not to feel that on opening that

letter he must be alone with the dead.

It is strange that we need have so little practical household knowledge

of each other to be in love. Never till then had Kenelm’s eyes rested

upon Lily’s handwriting. And he now gazed at the formal address on the

envelope with a sort of awe. Unknown handwriting coming to him from an

unknown world,--delicate, tremulous handwriting,--handwriting not of one

grown up, yet not of a child who had long to live.

He turned the envelope over and over,--not impatiently, as does the

lover whose heart beats at the sound of the approaching footstep, but

lingeringly, timidly. He would not break the seal.

He was now so near the burial-ground. Where should the first letter

ever received from her--the sole letter he ever could receive--be so

reverentially, lovingly read, as at her grave?

He walked on to the burial-ground, sat down by the grave, broke the

envelope; a poor little ring, with a poor little single turquoise,

rolled out and rested at his feet. The letter contained only these

words,--

The ring comes back to you. I could not live to marry another. I never

knew how I loved you--till, till I began to pray that you might not love

me too much. Darling! darling! good-by, darling!

LILY.

Don’t let Lion ever see this, or ever know what it says to you. He is so

good, and deserves to be so happy. Do you remember the day of the ring?

Darling! darling!

CHAPTER XIV.

SOMEWHAT more than another year has rolled away. It is early spring

in London. The trees in the park and squares are budding into leaf and

blossom. Leopold Travers has had a brief but serious conversation with

his daughter, and now gone forth on horseback. Handsome and graceful

still, Leopold Travers when in London is pleased to find himself

scarcely less the fashion with the young than he was when himself in

youth. He is now riding along the banks of the Serpentine, no one better

mounted, better dressed, better looking, or talking with greater fluency

on the topics which interest his companions.

Cecilia is in the smaller drawing-room, which is exclusively

appropriated to her use, alone with Lady Glenalvon.

LADY GLENALVON.--“I own, my dear, dear Cecilia, that I arrange myself at

last on the side of your father. How earnestly at one time I had hoped

that Kenelm Chillingly might woo and win the bride that seemed to me

most fitted to adorn and to cheer his life, I need not say. But when at

Exmundham he asked me to befriend his choice of another, to reconcile

his mother to that choice,--evidently not a suitable one,--I gave him

up. And though that affair is at an end, he seems little likely ever to

settle down to practical duties and domestic habits, an idle wanderer

over the face of the earth, only heard of in remote places and with

strange companions. Perhaps he may never return to England.”

CECILIA.--“He is in England now, and in London.”

LADY GLENALVON.--“You amaze me! Who told you so?”

CECILIA.--“His father, who is with him. Sir Peter called yesterday, and

spoke to me so kindly.” Cecilia here turned aside her face to conceal

the tears that had started to her eyes.

LADY GLENALVON.--“Did Mr. Travers see Sir Peter?”

CECILIA.--“Yes; and I think it was something that passed between them

which made my father speak to me--for the first time--almost sternly.”

LADY GLENALVON.--“In urging Chillingly Gordon’s suit?”

CECILIA.--“Commanding me to reconsider my rejection of it. He has

contrived to fascinate my father.”

LADY GLENALVON.--“So he has me. Of course you might choose among other

candidates for your hand one of much higher worldly rank, of much larger

fortune; yet, as you have already rejected them, Gordon’s merits become

still more entitled to a fair hearing. He has already leaped into

a position that mere rank and mere wealth cannot attain. Men of all

parties speak highly of his parliamentary abilities. He is already

marked in public opinion as a coming man,--a future minister of the

highest grade. He has youth and good looks; his moral character is

without a blemish: yet his manners are so free from affected austerity,

so frank, so genial. Any woman might be pleased with his companionship;

and you, with your intellect, your culture,--you, so born for high

station,--you of all women might be proud to partake the anxieties of

his career and the rewards of his ambition.”

CECILIA (clasping her hands tightly together).--“I cannot, I cannot. He

may be all you say,--I know nothing against Mr. Chillingly Gordon,--but

my whole nature is antagonistic to his, and even were it not so--”

She stopped abruptly, a deep blush warming up her fair face, and

retreating to leave it coldly pale.

LADY GLENALVON (tenderly kissing her).--“You have not, then, even

yet conquered the first maiden fancy; the ungrateful one is still

remembered?”

Cecilia bowed her head on her friend’s breast, and murmured imploringly,

“Don’t speak against him; he has been so unhappy. How much he must have

loved!”

“But it is not you whom he loved.”

“Something here, something at my heart, tells me that he will love me

yet; and, if not, I am contented to be his friend.”

CHAPTER XV.

WHILE the conversation just related took place between Cecilia and

Lady Glenalvon, Chillingly Gordon was seated alone with Mivers in

the comfortable apartment of the cynical old bachelor. Gordon had

breakfasted with his kinsman, but that meal was long over; the two

men having found much to talk about on matters very interesting to the

younger, nor without interest to the elder one.

It is true that Chillingly Gordon had, within the very short space of

time that had elapsed since his entrance into the House of Commons,

achieved one of those reputations which mark out a man for early

admission into the progressive career of office,--not a very showy

reputation, but a very solid one. He had none of the gifts of the

genuine orator, no enthusiasm, no imagination, no imprudent bursts of

fiery words from a passionate heart. But he had all the gifts of

an exceedingly telling speaker,--a clear metallic voice; well-bred,

appropriate action, not less dignified for being somewhat too quiet;

readiness for extempore replies; industry and method for prepared

expositions of principle or fact. But his principal merit with the

chiefs of the assembly was in the strong good sense and worldly tact

which made him a safe speaker. For this merit he was largely indebted to

his frequent conferences with Chillingly Mivers. That gentleman, whether

owing to his social qualities or to the influence of “The Londoner” on

public opinion, enjoyed an intimate acquaintance with the chiefs of all

parties, and was up to his ears in the wisdom of the world. “Nothing,”

he would say, “hurts a young Parliamentary speaker like violence in

opinion, one way or the other. Shun it. Always allow that much may be

said on both sides. When the chiefs of your own side suddenly adopt a

violence, you can go with them or against them, according as best suits

your own book.”

“So,” said Mivers, reclined on his sofa, and approaching the end of his

second Trabuco (he never allowed himself more than two), “so I think we

have pretty well settled the tone you must take in your speech to-night.

It is a great occasion.”

“True. It is the first time in which the debate has been arranged so

that I may speak at ten o’clock or later. That in itself is a great

leap; and it is a Cabinet minister whom I am to answer,--luckily, he

is a very dull fellow. Do you think I might hazard a joke,--at least a

witticism?”

“At his expense? Decidedly not. Though his office compels him to

introduce this measure, he was by no means in its favour when it was

discussed in the Cabinet; and though, as you say, he is dull, it is

precisely that sort of dulness which is essential to the formation

of every respectable Cabinet. Joke at him, indeed! Learn that gentle

dulness never loves a joke--at its own expense. Vain man! seize the

occasion which your blame of his measure affords you to secure his

praise of yourself; compliment him. Enough of politics. It never does to

think too much over what one has already decided to say. Brooding over

it, one may become too much in earnest, and commit an indiscretion. So

Kenelm has come back?”

“Yes. I heard that news last night, at White’s, from Travers. Sir Peter

had called on Travers.”

“Travers still favours your suit to the heiress?”

“More, I think, than ever. Success in Parliament has great effect on a

man who has success in fashion and respects the opinion of clubs. But

last night he was unusually cordial. Between you and me, I think he is

a little afraid that Kenelm may yet be my rival. I gathered that from a

hint he let fall of the unwelcome nature of Sir Peter’s talk to him.”

“Why has Travers conceived a dislike to poor Kenelm? He seemed partial

enough to him once.”

“Ay, but not as a son-in-law, even before I had a chance of becoming so.

And when, after Kenelm appeared at Exmundham, while Travers was staying

there, Travers learned, I suppose from Lady Chillingly, that Kenelm had

fallen in love with and wanted to marry some other girl, who it

seems rejected him; and still more when he heard that Kenelm had been

subsequently travelling on the Continent in company with a low-lived

fellow, the drunken, riotous son of a farrier, you may well conceive how

so polished and sensible a man as Leopold Travers would dislike the

idea of giving his daughter to one so little likely to make an agreeable

son-in-law. Bah! I have no fear of Kenelm. By the way, did Sir Peter say

if Kenelm had quite recovered his health? He was at death’s door some

eighteen months ago, when Sir Peter and Lady Chillingly were summoned to

town by the doctors.”

“My dear Gordon, I fear there is no chance of your succession to

Exmundham. Sir Peter says that his wandering Hercules is as stalwart

as ever, and more equable in temperament, more taciturn and grave,--in

short, less odd. But when you say you have no fear of Kenelm’s rivalry,

do you mean only as to Cecilia Travers?”

“Neither as to that nor as to anything in life; and as to the succession

to Exmundham, it is his to leave as he pleases, and I have cause to

think he would never leave it to me. More likely to Parson John or the

parson’s son,--or why not to yourself? I often think that for the prizes

immediately set before my ambition I am better off without land: land is

a great obfuscator.”

“Humph, there is some truth in that. Yet the fear of land and

obfuscation does not seem to operate against your suit to Cecilia

Travers?”

“Her father is likely enough to live till I maybe contented to ‘rest and

be thankful’ in the Upper House; and I should not like to be a landless

peer.”

“You are right there; but I should tell you that, now Kenelm has come

back, Sir Peter has set his heart on his son’s being your rival.”

“For Cecilia?”

“Perhaps; but certainly for Parliamentary reputation. The senior member

for the county means to retire, and Sir Peter has been urged to allow

his son to be brought forward,--from what I hear, with the certainty of

success.”

“What! in spite of that wonderful speech of his on coming of age?”

“Pooh! that is now understood to have been but a bad joke on the new

ideas, and their organs, including ‘The Londoner.’ But if Kenelm does

come into the House, it will not be on your side of the question; and

unless I greatly overrate his abilities--which very likely I do--he will

not be a rival to despise. Except, indeed, that he may have one fault

which in the present day would be enough to unfit him for public life.”

“And what is that fault?”

“Treason to the blood of the Chillinglys. This is the age, in England,

when one cannot be too much of a Chillingly. I fear that if Kenelm does

become bewildered by a political abstraction,--call it, no matter what,

say, ‘love of his country,’ or some such old-fashioned crotchet,--I

fear, I greatly fear, that he may be--in earnest.”

CHAPTER THE LAST.

IT was a field night in the House of Commons,--an adjourned debate,

opened by George Belvoir, who had been, the last two years, very slowly

creeping on in the favour, or rather the indulgence of the House, and

more than justifying Kenelm’s prediction of his career. Heir to a noble

name and vast estates, extremely hard-working, very well informed, it

was impossible that he should not creep on. That night he spoke sensibly

enough, assisting his memory by frequent references to his notes;

listened to courteously, and greeted with a faint “Hear, hear!” of

relief when he had done.

Then the House gradually thinned till nine o’clock, at which hour it

became very rapidly crowded. A Cabinet minister had solemnly risen,

deposited on the table before him a formidable array of printed papers,

including a corpulent blue-book. Leaning his arm on the red box, he

commenced with this awe-compelling sentence,--

“Sir, I join issue with the right honourable gentleman opposite. He

says this is not raised as a party question. I deny it. Her Majesty’s

Government are put upon their trial.”

Here there were cheers, so loudly, and so rarely greeting a speech from

that Cabinet minister, that he was put out, and had much to “hum” and to

“ha,” before he could recover the thread of his speech. Then he went on,

with unbroken but lethargic fluency; read long extracts from the public

papers, inflicted a whole page from the blue-book, wound up with a

peroration of respectable platitudes, glanced at the clock, saw that he

had completed the hour which a Cabinet minister who does not profess to

be oratorical is expected to speak, but not to exceed; and sat down.

Up rose a crowd of eager faces, from which the Speaker, as previously

arranged with the party whips, selected one,--a young face, hardy,

intelligent, emotionless.

I need not say that it was the face of Chillingly Gordon. His position

that night was one that required dexterous management and delicate tact.

He habitually supported the Government; his speeches had been hitherto

in their favour. On this occasion he differed from the Government. The

difference was known to the chiefs of the Opposition, and hence the

arrangement of the whips, that he should speak for the first time after

ten o’clock, and for the first time in reply to a Cabinet minister.

It is a position in which a young party man makes or mars his future.

Chillingly Gordon spoke from the third row behind the Government; he had

been duly cautioned by Mivers not to affect a conceited independence, or

an adhesion to “violence” in ultra-liberal opinions, by seating

himself below the gangway. Speaking thus, amid the rank and file of the

Ministerial supporters, any opinion at variance with the mouthpieces of

the Treasury Bench would be sure to produce a more effective sensation

than if delivered from the ranks of the mutinous Bashi Bazouks divided

by the gangway from better disciplined forces. His first brief sentences

enthralled the House, conciliated the Ministerial side, kept the

Opposition side in suspense. The whole speech was, indeed, felicitously

adroit, and especially in this, that, while in opposition to the

Government as a whole, it expressed the opinions of a powerful section

of the Cabinet, which, though at present a minority, yet being the most

enamoured of a New Idea, the progress of the age would probably render

a safe investment for the confidence which honest Gordon reposed in its

chance of beating its colleagues.

It was not, however, till Gordon had concluded that the cheers of his

audience--impulsive and hearty as are the cheers of that assembly when

the evidence of intellect is unmistakable--made manifest to the gallery

and the reporters the full effect of the speech he had delivered. The

chief of the Opposition whispered to his next neighbour, “I wish we

could get that man.” The Cabinet minister whom Gordon had answered--more

pleased with a personal compliment to himself than displeased with an

attack on the measure his office compelled him to advocate--whispered to

his chief, “That is a man we must not lose.”

Two gentlemen in the Speaker’s gallery, who had sat there from the

opening of the debate, now quitted their places. Coming into the lobby,

they found themselves commingled with a crowd of members who had also

quitted their seats, after Gordon’s speech, in order to discuss its

merits, as they gathered round the refreshment table for oranges or

soda-water. Among them was George Belvoir, who, on sight of the younger

of the two gentlemen issuing from the Speaker’s gallery, accosted him

with friendly greeting,--

“Ha! Chillingly, how are you? Did not know you were in town. Been

here all the evening? Yes; very good debate. How did you like Gordon’s

speech?”

“I liked yours much better.”

“Mine!” cried George, very much flattered and very much surprised. “Oh,

mine was a mere humdrum affair, a plain statement of the reasons for the

vote I should give. And Gordon’s was anything but that. You did not like

his opinions?”

“I don’t know what his opinions are. But I did not like his ideas.”

“I don’t quite understand you. What ideas?”

“The new ones; by which it is shown how rapidly a great state can be

made small.”

Here Mr. Belvoir was taken aside by a brother member, on an important

matter to be brought before the committee on salmon fisheries, on which

they both served; and Kenelm, with his companion, Sir Peter, threaded

his way through the crowded lobby and disappeared. Emerging into the

broad space, with its lofty clock-tower, Sir Peter halted, and pointing

towards the old Abbey, half in shadow, half in light, under the tranquil

moonbeams, said,--

“It tells much for the duration of a people when it accords with the

instinct of immortality in a man; when an honoured tomb is deemed

recompense for the toils and dangers of a noble life. How much of the

history of England Nelson summed up in the simple words,--‘Victory or

Westminster Abbey.’”

“Admirably expressed, my dear father,” said Kenelm, briefly.

“I agree with your remark, which I overheard, on Gordon’s speech,”

resumed Sir Peter. “It was wonderfully clever; yet I should have been

sorry to hear you speak it. It is not by such sentiments that Nelsons

become great. If such sentiments should ever be national, the cry will

not be ‘Victory or Westminster Abbey!’ but ‘Defeat and the Three per

Cents!’”

Pleased with his own unwonted animation, and with the sympathizing

half-smile on his son’s taciturn lips, Sir Peter then proceeded more

immediately to the subjects which pressed upon his heart. Gordon’s

success in Parliament, Gordon’s suit to Cecilia Travers, favoured, as

Sir Peter had learned, by her father, rejected as yet by herself, were

somehow inseparably mixed up in Sir Peter’s mind and his words, as he

sought to kindle his son’s emulation. He dwelt on the obligations which

a country imposed on its citizens, especially on the young and vigorous

generation to which the destinies of those to follow were intrusted;

and with these stern obligations he combined all the cheering and tender

associations which an English public man connects with an English home:

the wife with a smile to soothe the cares, and a mind to share the

aspirations, of a life that must go through labour to achieve renown;

thus, in all he said, binding together, as if they could not be

disparted, Ambition and Cecilia.

His son did not interrupt him by a word, Sir Peter in his eagerness not

noticing that Kenelm had drawn him aside from the direct thoroughfare,

and had now made halt in the middle of Westminster bridge, bending

over the massive parapet and gazing abstractedly upon the waves of

the starlit river. On the right the stately length of the people’s

legislative palace, so new in its date, so elaborately in each detail

ancient in its form, stretching on towards the lowly and jagged roofs of

penury and crime. Well might these be so near to the halls of a people’s

legislative palace: near to the heart of every legislator for a people

must be the mighty problem how to increase a people’s splendour and its

virtue, and how to diminish its penury and its crime.

“How strange it is,” said Kenelm, still bending over the parapet,

“that throughout all my desultory wanderings I have ever been attracted

towards the sight and the sound of running waters, even those of the

humblest rill! Of what thoughts, of what dreams, of what memories,

colouring the history of my past, the waves of the humblest rill could

speak, were the waves themselves not such supreme philosophers,--roused

indeed on their surface, vexed by a check to their own course, but so

indifferent to all that makes gloom or death to the mortals who think

and dream and feel beside their banks.”

“Bless me,” said Peter to himself, “the boy has got back to his old vein

of humours and melancholies. He has not heard a word I have been saying.

Travers is right. He will never do anything in life. Why did I christen

him Kenelm? he might as well have been christened Peter.” Still, loth

to own that his eloquence had been expended in vain and that the wish of

his heart was doomed to expire disappointed, Sir Peter said aloud, “You

have not listened to what I said; Kenelm, you grieve me.”

“Grieve you! you! do not say that, Father, dear Father. Listen to you!

Every word you have said has sunk into the deepest deep of my heart.

Pardon my foolish, purposeless snatch of talk to myself: it is but my

way, only my way, dear Father!”

“Boy, boy,” cried Sir Peter, with tears in his voice, “if you could

get out of those odd ways of yours I should be so thankful. But if

you cannot, nothing you can do shall grieve me. Only, let me say this;

running waters have had a great charm for you. With a humble rill you

associate thoughts, dreams, memories in your past. But now you halt by

the stream of the mighty river: before you the senate of an empire wider

than Alexander’s; behind you the market of a commerce to which that of

Tyre was a pitiful trade. Look farther down, those squalid hovels,

how much there to redeem or to remedy; and out of sight, but not very

distant, the nation’s Walhalla, ‘Victory or Westminster Abbey!’ The

humble rill has witnessed your past. Has the mighty river no effect on

your future? The rill keeps no record of your past: shall the river

keep no record of your future? Ah, boy, boy, I see you are dreaming

still,--no use talking. Let us go home.”

“I was not dreaming, I was telling myself that the time had come to

replace the old Kenelm with the new ideas, by a new Kenelm with the

Ideas of Old. Ah! perhaps we must,--at whatever cost to ourselves,--we

must go through the romance of life before we clearly detect what is

grand in its realities. I can no longer lament that I stand estranged

from the objects and pursuits of my race. I have learned how much I have

with them in common. I have known love; I have known sorrow.”

Kenelm paused a moment, only a moment, then lifted the head which,

during that pause, had drooped, and stood erect at the full height of

his stature, startling his father by the change that had passed over his

face; lip, eye, his whole aspect, eloquent with a resolute enthusiasm,

too grave to be the flash of a passing moment.

“Ay, ay,” he said, “Victory or Westminster Abbey! The world is a

battle-field in which the worst wounded are the deserters, stricken as

they seek to fly, and hushing the groans that would betray the secret of

their inglorious hiding-place. The pain of wounds received in the thick

of the fight is scarcely felt in the joy of service to some honoured

cause, and is amply atoned by the reverence for noble scars. My choice

is made. Not that of deserter, that of soldier in the ranks.”

“It will not be long before you rise from the ranks, my boy, if you hold

fast to the Idea of Old, symbolized in the English battle-cry, ‘Victory

or Westminster Abbey.’”

So saying, Sir Peter took his son’s arm, leaning on it proudly; and so,

into the crowded thoroughfares, from the halting-place on the modern

bridge that spans the legendary river, passes the Man of the Young

Generation to fates beyond the verge of the horizon to which the eyes of

my generation must limit their wistful gaze.

THE END.